STARKWEATHER, CHARLES (1938-1959)

Charles Starkweather, Nebraska's most infamous
son and one of America's most shocking
serial killers, terrorized the Great Plains in
the winter of 1957–58 when he embarked on
a brutal murder rampage with his fourteen-year-
old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. Put to
death for his crimes, Starkweather, whose case
received unprecedented national media coverage,
shocked America out of its 1950s maltshop
innocence and foreshadowed the modern
spree killer, whose victims are chosen
largely at random to satisfy some deep-rooted
hatred of humanity and to settle some secret
grudge against society.

Charles was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on
November 24, 1938, the third of seven children
of Guy and Helen Starkweather. Guy worked
as a carpenter-handyman, Helen as a waitress.
By all accounts they were good, decent, loving
parents. Starkweather is said to have experienced
an ordinary, normal childhood until he
began his schooling. From prison, he reflected
that his hatred for society was spawned on the
kindergarten playground when on his first day
of school his fellow classmates mocked his
speech impediment and bowlegs, making him
feel isolated and different. Starkweather wrote
that on that fateful day his heart turned "black
with hate and rage," and he vowed revenge.

Starkweather's life between the kindergarten
incident and eleven gruesome homicides
reflects his antisocial and deeply troubled
mind. As a youth he had a hair-trigger temper
and was constantly involved in fistfights. A
loner and an outcast, Starkweather became obsessed
with guns and hunting. He began to
idolize and emulate actor James Dean, star of
Rebel Without a Cause, the 1955 film classic
about alienated youth. He adopted Dean's "live
fast, die young" credo. He became increasingly
disillusioned with his job as a trash collector
and in the years before the killings began having
terrifying nightmares and vivid, bizarre
hallucinations during which he would converse
with "Death." Also during this period
Starkweather, the shy, withdrawn loner, found
a girlfriend in Caril Ann Fugate.

Caril Ann and Charles were soon inseparable.
She fit nicely into his paranoid, alienated
worldview, willingly adopting and reinforcing
his self-imposed exile from mainstream society.
Strangely, instead of quelling Starkweather's
murderous predilections, his storybook
romance with Caril Ann seems to have
driven him over the edge, convincing him that
the end was near, that he must take action
soon. In Starkweather's mind Caril Ann had
finally given him "something worth killing
for."

Starkweather's murder spree began on December
1, 1957, when he robbed a Lincoln gas
station, kidnapped the attendant, Robert Colvert,
and shot him to death on a lonely rural
road. The murder gave Starkweather a feeling
of power; he had operated outside of the law
and gotten away with it. Violence erupted
once again on January 21, 1958, when Starkweather
fought with Velda Bartlett (Caril
Ann's mother) over the teenagers' relationship.
In a rage, he savagely beat, stabbed, and
shot her to death, along with Caril Ann's stepfather
and baby sister.

After Starkweather killed Caril Ann's family,
the couple kicked off a weeklong frenzy of
violence that resulted in another seven homicides.
In need of money and supplies, Starkweather
killed seventy-two-year-old August
Meyer, a longtime family friend, at his rural
Lincoln residence. Seventeen-year-old Robert
Jensen and sixteen-year-old Carol King were
the next victims when, on January 27, Starkweather
and Fugate picked up the hitchhiking
couple. Starkweather shot Jensen six times in
the back of the head and shot and stabbed
King repeatedly. Incredibly, Starkweather and
Fugate then returned to Lincoln, where they
invaded the home of C. Lauer Ward, a wealthy
industrialist. Starkweather stabbed and shot
to death Lauer, his wife, Clara, and the housekeeper,
Lillian Fencl. Loading the Wards' 1956
Packard with food, the couple headed west
across the Plains.

By now a major manhunt was in progress.
The Nebraska National Guard cruised Lincoln
streets in jeeps fitted with machine guns. Parents
armed with guns escorted their children
to and from school. Aircraft searched for the
Wards' black car, while authorities initiated
a block-to-block search. Meanwhile, Starkweather
and Fugate made it to Wyoming on
January 29 and were in search of a car that
authorities would not recognize. Merle Collison,
a traveling salesman who was sleeping in
his car alongside the highway, became the final
victim when he refused to surrender his
car. Starkweather was captured shortly thereafter
by Wyoming authorities and extradited
to Nebraska.

Starkweather and Fugate were charged with
first-degree murder, convicted, and sentenced,
Fugate to life in prison, Charles Starkweather
to death. He was executed in Nebraska's
electric chair on June 25, 1959. Caril Ann
Fugate was paroled on June 20, 1976, after seventeen
years of imprisonment. She continues
to proclaim her innocence, denying complicity
in the killings.

Derrick S. Ward
Ventura, California

Allen, William. Starkweather: The Story of a Mass Murder.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.